In the mid-1800s, as cities were rapidly expanding, it became increasingly difficult to get fresh milk to urban areas. The cows – and their food sources such as grass and hay – were in the country. Slow and unreliable roads and lack of refrigeration made getting the milk into the city difficult and expensive.
While New York City didn’t have dairy farms, it did have an abundance of two other commodities: distilleries and a drinking public. It was found that dairy cows could be fed the “mash” that had been used to ferment whiskey, for far less than the cost of whole grain, grass, or hay. The whiskey men began to build barns and troughs next to distilleries so the scalding hot mash could be directly dumped into feed troughs. Hundreds of independent milkmen bought dairy cows and paid the distillery six cents a day to feed and milk their cows. The swill milk industry was born.
Each cow’s head was roped over the trough. If the cow lay down, it was into its own manure or even the previous occupant’s. Nearly all the cows were diseased. A cow too sick to stand was hoisted upright by ropes overhead and milked until it died. The average life span of a cow here was six months. Carcasses were set out where butchers could buy them for very little.
The milk cans were cleaned so seldom many formed a brown crust of manure along the bottom. If a cow had ulcers or pus on their udders, that was squeezed into the cans as well. A pint of water was then added to the milk for every gallon. Chalk was added to restore color. The individual milk sellers would add eggs, honey, salt, more water, or whatever they thought would restore the swill milk to the appearance and odor of natural milk.
Doctors wrote to Frank Leslie’s newspaper after the exposé was published. The doctors condemned consuming swill milk, listing diarrhea, dehydration, cholera and “marasmus,” (a term for acute starvation) causing infants’ deaths.
Meanwhile, hundreds of tons of manure were dumped daily into the Hudson or East Rivers. A distillery barn in New York City had a ditch that sent the manure directly down into the water—and guess where the water in the milk came from.
The barns “belched forth an intolerable and stinking stench.” The stench could be smelled from a mile away.